PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

The authors write that, supposedly, "Greenland recently incurred record
high temperatures and ice loss by melting, adding to concerns that
anthropogenic warming is impacting the Greenland ice sheet and in turn
accelerating global sea-level rise."

However, they state that "it remains imprecisely known for
Greenland how much warming is caused by increasing atmospheric
greenhouse gases versus natural variability."

What was done

In rigorously exploring this question of recent warmth attribution,
Kobashi et al. reconstructed "Greenland surface snow temperature
variability over the past 4000 years at the GISP2 site (near the
Summit of the Greenland ice sheet; hereafter referred to as
Greenland temperature) with a new method that utilizes argon and
nitrogen isotopic ratios from occluded air bubbles," as described
in detail by Kobashi et al. (2008a,b).

What was learned

The eight researchers report that "the temperature record starts with a
colder period in 'the Bronze Age Cold Epoch'," which they say was
followed by "a warm period in 'the Bronze Age Optimum'," which was
followed by a 1000-year cooling that began "during 'the Iron/Roman Age
Optimum'," which was followed by "the Dark Ages," which was
followed by "the Medieval Warm Period," which was followed by
"the Little Ice Age" - which they describe as "the coldest period of
the past 4000 years" - which was followed, last of all, by
"the recent warming."

For comparative purposes, they also note that "the current decadal
average surface temperature at the summit is as warm as in the
1930s-1940s, and there was another similarly warm period in the
1140s (Medieval Warm Period)," indicating that "the present decade
is not outside the envelope of variability of the last 1000 years."

In fact, they say that "excluding the last millennium," there were
fully "72 decades warmer than the present one, in which mean
temperatures were 1.0 to 1.5°C warmer," and that during two centennial
intervals, average temperatures "were nearly 1.0°C warmer than
the present decade"

What it means

Since the Greenland summit's decadal warmth of the first ten years of
the 21st century was exceeded fully six dozen times over the prior
four millennia, it is clear that it was in no way unusual,
unnatural or unprecedented; and, therefore, it is clear that none
of Greenland's recent warming need have been caused by increasing
greenhouse gases.

Indeed, it is far more likely that its recent warmth is nothing more
than the next expected phase of the natural oscillation of climate that
has produced several-hundred-year periods of alternating warmth and
cold over the past four thousand years.

See Climate Oscillations (Millennia Variability) in our Subject
Index for more on this important topic.

PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences, University of Virginia;
Former director Weather Satellite Service;
Founder and President of the Science & Enviromental Policy Project;
Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University.

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently
chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette,
Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California.
In 1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics
systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations
nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers,
weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment.
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to
photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across
the U.S.

en
Seeing is Believing
Isolated for 42 days in chambers of ambient and elevated
CO2 concentrations,
we periodically document the growth of cowpea plants (Vigna unguiculata)
via time-lapse photography.

en
Matt Ridley on How Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet
Over the past three decades, our planet has gotten greener!
Even stranger, the greening of the planet in recent decades appears
to be happening because of, not despite, our reliance on fossil fuels.
While environmentalists often talk about how bad stuff like
CO2 causes bad things to happen like global
warming, it turns out that the plants aren't complaining.

The giver of life
This is a short description of the process of photosynthesis and how
the carbon dioxide molecule gives us life as well as heat

The graphs show how the rate of photosynthesis varies with irradiance,
the three experiments differing only in the concentration of
CO2.

The lowest graph is that for a CO2
concentration of 0.03%, much as it is at this time [actually ~385 ppmv
or 0.0385%].

In the early part of the graph the rate of the reaction is related
almost directly to the amount of irradiance, but the rate falls
off at higher irradiances and eventually levels off.

This tells us that at higher irradiances it is the
concentration of CO2 that limits the
reaction rate, there is sufficient light falling on the leaves,
but the requirement for more CO2 is the
limiting factor.

We strongly object to CO2 being
regarded as a pollutant; it is the giver of life and we all
depend upon its chemical and radiative properties.